Indebted

You know what's been bothering me lately? The amount of personal debt people are racking up. It's not good short-term and it's really not good long-term. This is aside from the billions of dollars of overvalued home loans that banks still need to write down, and the commercial property that's foundering with no new businesses to occupy the space. It's bad out there, and it's not going to get better any time soon.
   When I was in college tuition was low, $4 a semester hour. This was, partly, holdover from the Great Society decades before, but it was also because that's what the market would bear. Tuition was largely determined by the maximum amount students could pay, which itself was determined by the dollar amount of student loans the government would guarantee. Which, at the time, was $2,500 a semester (I think). With scholarships and grants I got out of college with about $18,000 in debt. About the same amount as if I'd bought a car, only the interest rate was crazy low and the monthly payments were minuscule. Back then education was good debt to have, because it greatly increased your earning potential with a relatively cheap outlay of funds.
   Fast forward a few years, and Congress decided to allow banks to make non-guaranteed loans to students, and the banks were only too happy to shovel cash out the door. And tuition went up. Dramatically. So instead of college costing essentially $5,000 a year, it went to $20,000 or more a semester.
   At that rate, education is no longer good debt. A friend of mine - or 'friend' since he's kind of a tool - was on the seven-year program at the University, and he came out of it with over $100,000 worth of private, non-guaranteed debt, which he has never been able to make a single payment on. This is an insane amount of debt, and does not in any way cover the increase in earning potential conferred by a college degree. It's equivalent of a new house, for God's sake, the single largest purchase most Americans will make, and students have this money anvil hanging over them from the moment they take their diploma.
   And don't get me started on the for-profit schools, like the cooking school up the street. They're charging $50,000 a year for a two-year program, and these kids who go into the program with visions of being Bobby Flay are going to graduate to a job at iHop. They're never, ever, ever going to be able to pay back that $100,000. Ever.
   Unemployment is high, but it's even higher among recent college graduates. Kids who absolutely need to find a decent job to start paying down their insane debt load are going a year, two years, three years without a job. Or working as a waiter or other dead-end entry-level job and not advancing their careers at all. And their debt goes unpaid. Even worse, being saddled with this burden means they'll come later to other American milestones in life, like getting married, which costs money, and having kids, which costs tons of money.
   This private debt burden is killing our society. And what's worse, it's stratifying our classes like never before. We're going to have an upper class of wealthy people who don't have unmanageable debt obligations and who will only get wealthier as a result, and we'll have indentured servants who are working to pay bills they'll never see the end of as long as they live.
   We gotta do something about this, and we gotta do something about it now.